February 27th, 2008
After taking a short break after Emily and I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon, I am ready to start training for my next event. I have decided to be somewhat ambitious and do a series of different events over the next 6 months. Here is my tentative plan:
If anyone wants to join me at any of these races, let me know.
February 19th, 2008
So I came across an interesting new startup on Techcrunch the other day – stickk.com. The idea is to make a “contract” with yourself to help you reach your goals. Basically, you are putting up real money which you will lose if you fail to meet your goal. This obviously gives a big financial incentive to follow through and hopefully accomplish your goals. You can designate the money to go to a charity, an anti-charity (for example, if you hate guns than you don’t want the money to end up going to the NRA), or to a friend. Having the money go to a friend is like making a bet and having an objective 3rd party hold the money for you until you see how it turns out.
I think it is a great idea and have decided to try it out. So last night, I made a contract with myself to lose some weight. One of my goals for the year was to weigh 215 lbs and maintain that weight through the year. So I am using Stickk.com to help motivate me to get started. Wish me luck!
February 18th, 2008
So I’ve been a bit discouraged with my progress on this website lately. The development of this site, my personal website, has taken much longer than expected. I mean, it has been almost 6 months since I began, and I have yet to really tell anyone about it. But then, when I stopped to think about it, I realized that this site is doing exactly what I had hoped it would; it is serving its purpose as a sandbox for me to try out various web development techniques and get a breadth of experience with a number of webdev skills. Though it may be slow going now, as I become more familiar with these technologies and techniques, it will speed up my development in the future. Basically, I am getting the learning curve out of the way now.
Since I started this website in September 2007, here is a list of all the things I have had to learn/figure out:
- How to create and customize a Blogger blog
- How to convert a Blogger blog into a WordPress blog
- How to install WordPress and create a custom WordPress theme
- How to install “Google Apps for Your Domain“
- Create a custom search engine using Google Co-op
- Google Analytics
- Setting and reading cookies
- RSS feed specifications (how to build and parse a RSS 2.0 feed)
- How to syndicate an RSS feed through FeedBurner
- JQuery - Javascript framework
- Ajax – How to dynamically load part of a page through an Ajax call
And, hopefully, I will soon add these skills to my repertoire as well:
- XML Sitemaps
- Create a transparent favicon
- Dynamic RSS feeds (using PHP)
- Microformats - hResume
February 5th, 2008
In the upper right hand corner of this website, I’ve added 4 color themes (ok, they’ve been there for a while now, but I haven’t gotten around to writing about it until now). As I was designing this website, I had trouble deciding on a color theme so rather than deciding on one theme, I wanted to figure out a way to have several different color options. As I was researching different ways to implement these dynamic stylesheets, I came across a Javascript style switcher on A List Apart and then a PHP implementation.
My implementation is basically a modified version of the PHP code from the article. I decided to use PHP over Javascript for a number of reasons, but mainly because PHP is processed on the server side and will work even if the user turns off Javascript in their browser. The changes I made from the code in the original article are mostly just extra validation before setting the cookie. Both implementations use cookies to store the selected color theme so that the selection persists between pages and between sessions.
To try it out just click one of the colors in the upper right corner. Let me know which theme is your favorite.
February 3rd, 2008
Emily and I just finished the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Half Marathon. We made it! Despite some inclement weather, the run went really, really well. We finished in 2:09:57 (according to my watch), which means that we beat our goal of 10 minutes/mile. We kept a good pace through the whole race and were able to finish strong – we passed a ton of people in the last 2 miles. We had been training for this race for the last 2 months. Our training included running in the snow in Elkhart in sub-freezing temperatures and running in 80+ degree weather through the parks of Buenos Aires, Argentina. So we have been all over, but we have stuck to our training program and it paid off today.
The weather wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. We were expecting rain so Emily and I made a run to Sports Basement yesterday to get some rain gear for the race. At the start of the run, the weather was fine, but the last 3-4 miles were pretty bad. As we ran along Great Ocean Blvd., the rain started coming down and there was a really strong headwind. But we fought through it and still made our time. Also, after we crossed the finish line, the sun came back out and we were able to warm up a little.
This was the farthest I have ever run in my life. Distance running isn’t very easy for me, and I am proud that I was able to do it. Finishing a 1/2 marathon was one of my goals for the year. Now I am one step closer to another item on my lifelist – Finish a Marathon, although I have a lot more training to do to get there…
Update: Race results are now online. I finished 2859/4691 overall and beat Emily by 1 second!
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